Migrating from Blogger Classic Templates over to Layouts

Since the upgrade to Blogger last year I’ve stuck with the Classic Templates rather than downgrading to the new-fangled Layouts. But tonight I finally decided to bite the bullet and set up a parallel blog using a couple of recent entries using Layouts to see just how bad it would be to swap across.

The answer is that it’ll be time-consuming (reckon a couple more hours on top of the two hours I’ve spent tonight experimenting tonight while watching Waterloo Road and Heroes). There are some pros and cons:

• It does make it easy to add a background image to the blog banner ... though figuring out that 710x118 is the optimum size took a bit of guesswork!
  
• The automatic Link List elements are ok, but they a bit basic and don’t allow adding images to the links (eg, Blog Feed ) or having two URLs in the one entry (eg, Letter to America and Film Talk)
  
• But if I ignore the Link List element and use the HTML/JavaScript element instead, I can pretty much cut and paste portions of the existing template into the new layout without extra grunt work.
  
• There’s no Recent Comments page element. But the last five comments can be extracted by pointing the Feed element to yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default, ticking item dates and sources/authors. Unfortunately, it’s limited to the last 5 items – and can’t even be changed by hacking the HTML (which would probably also break the automatic template).

I’ve always been fond of the Rounders layout. But if I go ahead and migrate from Classic Template -> Layout I could quickly become a fan of Denim (or even Stretched Denim that uses the full width of your browser window).

So if you notice a few weirdnesses in AiB over the next day or two, please empathise with my pain!

Update: It took about an hour in the end. Now to get a good image for the banner.